C L O S E R

Protected: de Volkskrant – Binnenland – Allochtonen voor merendeel modern

Posted on June 13th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

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Protected: NRC Handelsblad – Inburgeren doe je zo: Newcomers in Morocco

Posted on June 4th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

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Protected: BN/DeStem – Overgrote meerderheid is niet racistisch

Posted on June 4th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

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Protected: Brabants Dagblad – Islam heeft in Nederland een heel slecht imago

Posted on June 4th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Islam in the Netherlands, Multiculti Issues.

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Protected: Brabants Dagblad – Kwart heeft afkeer van allochtonen

Posted on June 4th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

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Protected: de Volkskrant – Binnenland – Koningin zal in moskee geen handen schudden

Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

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C L O S E R – ‘Wilkommen zum’ commodification of Islam

Posted on June 1st, 2006 by .
Categories: Multiculti Issues, Some personal considerations, Young Muslims, Youth culture (as a practice).

Commodification is the transformation of what is normally a non-commodity into a commodity. In case of religion and culture it means that beliefs, symbols, experiences, and practices are turned into free-floating signifiers of an authentic, (read consumerist), self that can be consumed like any other product. Boubekeur (in ISIM Review 16: 12) sees a development of ‘cool islam’: the revalorization of the personal pleasure of consumption, success and competiveness. The youth forges a new urban islamic culture based both on an individualistic ethic that promotes economic success and a certain conception of well being. Religious and secular (consumer) symbols can come together as Boubekeur shows in several examples such as Mecca Cola’s French slogan: Drink with commitment (familiar with Nike’s Just do it!) which in Arab could mean: Drink faithfully.

Or what to think of a short story that was told by one of my ISIM colleagues. About a boy who was asked if he was a Muslim or not, and he stated (after a bit of thinking), yes, I have a mobile phone with the Quran on it! Nice for the Ilkone:

More orthodox people might find it offensive or ridiculous. Commodification is often seen in a negative light. But we shouldn’t forget that youth nowadays are growing up in a society that places much value upon consumerism. We shouldn’t be surprised that this has consequences for the religious convictions. We can probably also see it among youth that for example support Globalicious in their struggle against poverty and famine.

But also non-Muslims know how to commodify Islam. For example Dutch HEMA in a advertisement campaign in 2003 for their clothes. They used a woman with a headscarf in the campaign:

Probably not meant as a political statement, but as a means to expand their share of the market. Considering the discussions on internet however we should consider it as a political statement as well. Certainly when an another campaign from a mobile phone provider used a woman with a headscarf as well. On some internetfora this was seen as ridiculous: the backwardness (in their view) of Muslims combined with a highly sophisticated Western product. And of course now there is the campaign of Puma for the World Cup Football in Germany:

These are examples of a different type of commodification of course, because it is used by ‘Western’ companies with a completely different message. In this case Pumafootball is also supporting an aid campaign for Africa. Off course one can be a little cynical about their good intentions, but perhaps adds like these could also normalize the public presence of Islamic symbols. And yes, normalize in this case means (also) pulling them into the neo-liberal free market sphere and the culture of consumerism. Both forms of commodification are recent developments, interesting and relevant for thinking about religion and identity in the modern world.

2 comments.

C L O S E R – 'Wilkommen zum' commodification of Islam

Posted on June 1st, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues, Some personal considerations, Young Muslims, Youth culture (as a practice).

Commodification is the transformation of what is normally a non-commodity into a commodity. In case of religion and culture it means that beliefs, symbols, experiences, and practices are turned into free-floating signifiers of an authentic, (read consumerist), self that can be consumed like any other product. Boubekeur (in ISIM Review 16: 12) sees a development of ‘cool islam’: the revalorization of the personal pleasure of consumption, success and competiveness. The youth forges a new urban islamic culture based both on an individualistic ethic that promotes economic success and a certain conception of well being. Religious and secular (consumer) symbols can come together as Boubekeur shows in several examples such as Mecca Cola’s French slogan: Drink with commitment (familiar with Nike’s Just do it!) which in Arab could mean: Drink faithfully.

Or what to think of a short story that was told by one of my ISIM colleagues. About a boy who was asked if he was a Muslim or not, and he stated (after a bit of thinking), yes, I have a mobile phone with the Quran on it! Nice for the Ilkone:

More orthodox people might find it offensive or ridiculous. Commodification is often seen in a negative light. But we shouldn’t forget that youth nowadays are growing up in a society that places much value upon consumerism. We shouldn’t be surprised that this has consequences for the religious convictions. We can probably also see it among youth that for example support Globalicious in their struggle against poverty and famine.

But also non-Muslims know how to commodify Islam. For example Dutch HEMA in a advertisement campaign in 2003 for their clothes. They used a woman with a headscarf in the campaign:

Probably not meant as a political statement, but as a means to expand their share of the market. Considering the discussions on internet however we should consider it as a political statement as well. Certainly when an another campaign from a mobile phone provider used a woman with a headscarf as well. On some internetfora this was seen as ridiculous: the backwardness (in their view) of Muslims combined with a highly sophisticated Western product. And of course now there is the campaign of Puma for the World Cup Football in Germany:

These are examples of a different type of commodification of course, because it is used by ‘Western’ companies with a completely different message. In this case Pumafootball is also supporting an aid campaign for Africa. Off course one can be a little cynical about their good intentions, but perhaps adds like these could also normalize the public presence of Islamic symbols. And yes, normalize in this case means (also) pulling them into the neo-liberal free market sphere and the culture of consumerism. Both forms of commodification are recent developments, interesting and relevant for thinking about religion and identity in the modern world.

2 comments.

The New Yorker: Oriana Fallaci directs her fury toward Islam.

Posted on May 31st, 2006 by .
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

The New Yorker: Fact
THE AGITATOR
The New Yorker has a very interesting interview with Oriana Fallaci, by Margaret Talbot.

“Yesterday, I was hysterical,” the Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling me a story about a local dog owner and the liberties he’d allowed his animal to take in front of Fallaci’s town house, on the Upper East Side. Big mistake. “I no longer have the energy to get really angry, like I used to,” she added. It called to mind what the journalist Robert Scheer said about Fallaci after interviewing her for Playboy, in 1981: “For the first time in my life, I found myself feeling sorry for the likes of Khomeini, Qaddafi, the Shah of Iran, and Kissinger—all of whom had been the objects of her wrath—the people she described as interviewing ‘with a thousand feelings of rage.’ ”

[…]

Fallaci’s arguments appeal to many Europeans on a visceral level. The murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the “honor killings” of young women in England and Sweden, and the controversy in France over whether girls may wear head scarves to school have underscored the enormous clash in values between secular Europeans and fundamentalist Muslim immigrants. In Holland, immigration officials have begun showing potential immigrants films and brochures that detail certain “European” values, including equality of the sexes and tolerance of homosexuality. The implicit suggestion is that in order to live in Europe you must accept these ideas. Such clumsy efforts betray the frustration and confusion that many Europeans have felt since the riots that broke out in the suburbs of Paris last fall—perhaps the most spectacular sign that the assimilation of Western Europe’s fifteen million Muslims has stalled in many places, and never started in others.

Some European intellectuals have given Fallaci credit for offering an enraged, articulate voice to people who are genuinely bewildered and dismayed by the challenges of assimilating Islamic immigrants. In 2002, writing in the Italian weekly Panorama, Lucia Annunziata, a former foreign correspondent and columnist, and Carlo Rossella, then the magazine’s editor, argued that “The Rage and the Pride” had “redefined Italy’s conception of the current conflict between the Western world and the Islamic world. . . . Oriana Fallaci has confronted the issue with ironclad simplicity: We are different, she has said. And, at this point, we are incompatible.” The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, writing in Le Point, said that Fallaci “went too far,” reducing all “Sons of Allah to their worst elements,” yet he commended her for taking “the discourse and the actions of our adversaries” at their word and—in the wake of September 11th, the execution of Daniel Pearl, the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, and other atrocities committed in the name of Islam—not being intimidated by the “penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that which victimizes it.”

[…]

Fallaci sees the threat of Islamic fundamentalism as a revival of the Fascism that she and her sisters grew up fighting. She told me, “I am convinced that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing. With the Muslims, we have done the same thing.” She elaborated, in an e-mail, “Look at the Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs. They go on with the habits preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose their culture, or so-called culture, on us. . . . I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”

Fallaci refuses to recognize the limitations of this metaphor—say, the fact that Muslim immigration is not the same as an annexation by another state. And although European countries should indeed refuse to countenance certain cultural practices—polygamy, “honor killings,” and anti-Semitic teachings, for example—Fallaci tends to portray the worst practices of Islamic fundamentalists as representative of all Muslims. Certainly, European countries have made some foolish compromises in the name of placating Muslim residents. In Germany, where courts have ordered that Muslim religious instruction be offered in schools, just as Christian instruction is, critics have complained that the Islamic teaching often perpetuates a conservative version of Islam. The result, the historian Bernard Lewis argued, in a recent talk in Washington, is that “Islam as taught in Turkish schools is a sort of modernized, semi-secularized version of Islam, and Islam as taught in German schools is the full Wahhabi blast.” (This is a good reminder of why the American model of keeping religious instruction out of public schools facilitates assimilation.) Many of Fallaci’s objections, however, have more to do with her aesthetic sensibilities. For her, hearing Muslim prayers in Tuscany—she does her own wailing imitation—is a form of oppression. Yet such examples do not rise to the level of argument that she wants to make, which is that the native culture of Italy will collapse if Muslims keep immigrating.
[…]

And it is well known . . . that I do not accept the mendacity of the so-called Moderate Islam. I do not believe that a Good Islam and a Bad Islam exist. Only Islam exists. And Islam is the Koran. And the Koran says what it says. Whatever its version. Of course there are exceptions. Also, considering the mathematical calculation of probabilities, some good Muslims must exist. I mean Muslims who appreciate freedom and democracy and secularism. But, as I say in the ‘Apocalypse,’ . . . good Muslims are few. So tragically few, in fact, that they must go around with bodyguards.” (Here she mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former member of the Dutch parliament, whom Holland, shamefully, declared last month that it would strip of her citizenship, citing an irregularity in her 1997 asylum application.) She wrote that she found my question about whether she would tolerate any mosques in Europe “insidious” and “offensive,” because it “aims to portray me as the bloodthirsty fanatics, who during the French Revolution beheaded even the statues of the Holy Virgin and of Jesus Christ and the Saints. Or as the equally bloodthirsty fanatics of the Bolshevik Revolution, who burned the icons and executed the clergymen and used the churches as warehouses. Really, no honest person can suggest that my ideas belong to that kind of people. I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions.

[…]

Fallaci’s virtues are the virtues that shine most brightly in stark circumstances: the ferocious courage, and the willingness to say anything, that can amount to a life force. But Fallaci never convinced me that Europe’s encounter with immigration is that sort of circumstance. Not that it would matter to her. “You’ve got to get old, because you have nothing to lose,” she said over lunch that afternoon. “You have this respectability that is given to you, more or less. But you don’t give a damn. It is the ne plus ultra of freedom. And things that I didn’t used to say before—you know, there is in each of us a form of timidity, of cautiousness—now I open my big mouth. I say, ‘What are you going to do to me? You go fuck yourself—I say what I want.’ ”

2 comments.

IHRC – Islamic Human Rights Commission: British Muslims’ Expectations of the Government Project

Posted on May 30th, 2006 by .
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

IHRC – Islamic Human Rights Commission

The Islamic Human Rights Commission is “an independent, not-for-profit, campaign, research and advocacy organization based in London , UK” . They work in partnership with different organizations from all backgrounds, to campaign for justice for all peoples regardless of their racial, confessional or political background.

British Muslims’ Expectations of the Government Project

Through extensive surveys with Muslims across the UK , IHRC set out to give voice to the expectations of Muslims and articulate them to the British government. This project hopes to bring about a truly open and beneficial discussion aimed at changing policies and perceptions of a much maligned community whose diversity and sophistication is being ignored and condemned in an alarming and dangerous manner.

Reports are already available on citizenship, discrimination, schools and hijab. Further reports on university life, the media and Muslim contribution to British society are soon to follow.

Volume 5: [download summary] [order print version] (NEW)
Volume 4: [download summary] [order print version]
Volume 3: [download summary] [order print version]
Volume 2: [download summary] [order print version]
Volume 1: [download summary] [order print version]

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IHRC – Islamic Human Rights Commission: British Muslims' Expectations of the Government Project

Posted on May 30th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

IHRC – Islamic Human Rights Commission

The Islamic Human Rights Commission is “an independent, not-for-profit, campaign, research and advocacy organization based in London , UK” . They work in partnership with different organizations from all backgrounds, to campaign for justice for all peoples regardless of their racial, confessional or political background.

British Muslims’ Expectations of the Government Project

Through extensive surveys with Muslims across the UK , IHRC set out to give voice to the expectations of Muslims and articulate them to the British government. This project hopes to bring about a truly open and beneficial discussion aimed at changing policies and perceptions of a much maligned community whose diversity and sophistication is being ignored and condemned in an alarming and dangerous manner.

Reports are already available on citizenship, discrimination, schools and hijab. Further reports on university life, the media and Muslim contribution to British society are soon to follow.

Volume 5: [download summary] [order print version] (NEW)
Volume 4: [download summary] [order print version]
Volume 3: [download summary] [order print version]
Volume 2: [download summary] [order print version]
Volume 1: [download summary] [order print version]

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C L O S E R – The Dhimmi Card

Posted on May 28th, 2006 by .
Categories: Multiculti Issues, Some personal considerations.

Terms like “dhimmitude” are often used polemically, a little bit the same like the term political correct is used. The latter term refers more to politics concerning issues of the multiculti society, while the former seems to be a psychological attitude of people that have surrendered to Muslims (gaining) dominance. This of course has triggered some muslim bloggers who now seek to explain dhimmitude for dummies. Brian Ulrich made an attempt that has been given considerable attention around the blogosphere. Some excerpts:

It is, however, important to note the Covenant of Umar, the document eventually attributed to the reign of the second rightly guided caliph which sets out the laws which dhimmis were to follow as their part of the covenant. These are not in the Qur’an, and in fact many represent continuations of Byzantine and Sassanid practices. Many others, such as the ban on Arabic inscriptions, seem to imply that at the time these regulations actually took shape, authorities were concerned to maintain social and cultural distance between a ruling elite and non-Muslims, who were then a majority of the population outside the Arabian peninsula.

A point which I emphasize to my students, however, is that the Umar document represents the theory, not the practice. Occasionally a ruler would start enforcing most or all of its prohibitions, but more often the main impediments faced by Christians and Jews were those common to all minorities, a popular prejudice against that which was different emphasized especially in times of difficulty. The stereotypes involving Jews in the Muslim Middle Ages more closely resembled that of Hispanics in the contemporary United States than the conspiracy theorizing of today. Another window into non-Muslim communities is that utilized most effectively by S.D. Goitein, the treasure trove of documents known as the Cairo Geniza. Here we see in the voluminous correspondence of medieval Egyptian Jewry that in that place and time, Jews and Christians played important social and political roles and were fully integrated into the large and prosperous economy of the Islamic world.
As might be expected, individuals whose letters are preserved in the Geniza have a variety of opinions regarding their status, but in his A Mediterranean Society, Goitein uses the analogy of “a nation within a nation,” noting that they share a common homeland and ultimate government guaranteeing justice and security, but follow different laws and answer to different religious authorities. The importance of that last should not be underestimated, for medieval Muslim rulers relied on religious leaders to govern, and just as the ulema were responsible for the Muslims, so Jewish and Christian communal leaders were responsible for their own people.

The period of the Crusades and Mongol invasions is usually considered an important turning point in this history. I know more about the Christians, but Jews were also affected by the strong sense of Muslim identity under attack from these outside powers, and subject both to government demands for money to fight these wars and the fact they were, in effect, still outsiders to the now larger, religiously defined Muslim community.

Even then, however, we still don’t have anything like the anti-Semitism seen today in much of the Muslim Middle East. When did that start to appear?

Lewis ties this into the idea that Muslims resent the inversion of the order in which their true religion was leading them into a glorious future, though since I understand that theory is riddled with holes I didn’t quote it above. The main point is that the deplorable anti-Semitism we see today in places like Iran and Syria has its origins in Europe, not the Qur’an, even if certain Qur’anic verses are occasionally ripped out of context to justify it, and those who draw comparisons between Hamas, Ahmadinejad, and the Nazis might do well to consider their own analogy and remember that “pogrom” is a European word. (As an aside, there are perhaps interesting parallels in Lewis’s depiction of the British using allegations of Muslim anti-Semitism to intervene in the Ottoman Empire and certain events in the news today.)

In another post he elaborated a little more on the topic.

The first is the “Hispanic” analogy. That was pretty off-the-cuff, and I have no doubt that a careful academic study would prove it fatuous. What I was going for was the idea that Jews were seen more as menial people associated with jobs no one else wanted to do and to some degree as a cultural threat. Despite perhaps sharing a sports loyalty, I would disagree with the tone of Mariner’s comment in the thread. On the religious point, for example, I think anti-Catholic bigotry still plays some role in how we view Hispanics, but a more relevant comparison might be to the huge backlash against flying Mexican flags. I could tackle a couple of the others, too, but really taken past the level of people’s perceptions, you’re comparing apples and oranges – a medieval religious legal system defined first and foremost by religious identity as opposed to a modern secular one based off nationality in a territorial defined space. Tomorrow I’ll try to remember to grab a copy of Goitein’s Geniza study and see what the voices of the past actually have to say for themselves.

As far as the line about anti-Semitism first appearing in the late 19th century as a European import, that was Bernard Lewis’s quote, and I guess it does seem a bit odd out of context, though people should be given pause by the fact that this is not a scholar who is given to blaming things on Europe. (That’s part of why I’m leaning on him, especially for the modern period which I don’t know very well.) I haven’t re-read his entire book carefully, but from what I’ve glanced at and remember, what he calls anti-Semitism is basically this ideology which sees Jews as evil, powerful, manipulative, and responsible for many of the world’s problems. This is clearly different than seeing them as poor souls with an inferior religion. Seriously, the fact that works like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion originated in Europe isn’t even controversial!

Some of the reactions, like those at Faithfreedom.org, are typical for those who constantly pull the ‘dhimmi-card’: putting the other one down as a person whose mental abilities are flawed out of fear for the Muslim dominance. I do not know enough about ‘dhimmi’ in the history of muslim societies and communities. Probably more is to be said about it, so I’m waiting…

1 comment.

Boeken&cetera: ‘De’ Islam met cultureel antropologe Marjo Buitelaar

Posted on May 28th, 2006 by .
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, Multiculti Issues.

Boeken Artikelen: ‘De’ Islam
‘De’ Islam
Boeken&cetera met Marjo Buitelaar
Publicaties

Islam en het dagelijks leven

Het zou prettig zijn als een ieder die een oordeel uit wil spreken over de Islam, eerst een inburgeringscursus Islam bij Buitelaar ondergaat.Buitelaar ging naar Marokko en deed onderzoek naar de beleving van de vastenmaand ramadan en de betekenis van de ‘hammam’, het publieke badhuis. Ook in Nederland doet ze onderzoek onder vrouwen van Marokkaanse afkomst. Daarover schreef ze een genuanceerd verslag, verschenen onder de titel: “Islam en het dagelijks leven”.

Allereerst is duidelijk, maar moet nog maar eens gezegd, dat de Koran, net als de Bijbel en de Tora, multi-interpretabele werken zijn. Buitelaar maakt in deze aflevering van Boeken&cetera duidelijk dat er steeds meer aandacht is voor de religieuze identiteit van moslims en veel minder op alle andere identiteitvormende aspecten die een cultuur, een (immigrant) groep, met zich mee brengen.

Marjo Buitelaar is antropoloog en verbonden aan de faculteit Godgeleerdheid & Godsdienstwetenschap van de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

Voor een genuanceerd beeld met geluid kijkt u aanstaande zondag naar boeken&cetera.

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Boeken&cetera: 'De' Islam met cultureel antropologe Marjo Buitelaar

Posted on May 28th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, Multiculti Issues.

Boeken Artikelen: ‘De’ Islam
‘De’ Islam
Boeken&cetera met Marjo Buitelaar
Publicaties

Islam en het dagelijks leven

Het zou prettig zijn als een ieder die een oordeel uit wil spreken over de Islam, eerst een inburgeringscursus Islam bij Buitelaar ondergaat.Buitelaar ging naar Marokko en deed onderzoek naar de beleving van de vastenmaand ramadan en de betekenis van de ‘hammam’, het publieke badhuis. Ook in Nederland doet ze onderzoek onder vrouwen van Marokkaanse afkomst. Daarover schreef ze een genuanceerd verslag, verschenen onder de titel: “Islam en het dagelijks leven”.

Allereerst is duidelijk, maar moet nog maar eens gezegd, dat de Koran, net als de Bijbel en de Tora, multi-interpretabele werken zijn. Buitelaar maakt in deze aflevering van Boeken&cetera duidelijk dat er steeds meer aandacht is voor de religieuze identiteit van moslims en veel minder op alle andere identiteitvormende aspecten die een cultuur, een (immigrant) groep, met zich mee brengen.

Marjo Buitelaar is antropoloog en verbonden aan de faculteit Godgeleerdheid & Godsdienstwetenschap van de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

Voor een genuanceerd beeld met geluid kijkt u aanstaande zondag naar boeken&cetera.

0 comments.

C L O S E R – Hirsi Ali & Loyalty

Posted on May 25th, 2006 by .
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

Looking at the press reports and internet forums, it seems that many Muslim migrants and second generation are very glad that Hirsi Ali is going to leave this country and are not very sad about what happened to her. (A few seem to regret it but to me it looks like a minority but I have to admit I haven’t talked to many in real life about this).

I am wondering if they should be really pleased about all of this.

Let’s imagine the following. You are an asylumseeker. You have changed your story in such a way that you know you have more chance that the Dutch will grant you a status as a refugee. (The ones who never changed a story so that it would fit bureaucratic institutions, stop reading.) At that time you are in an asylum shelter (A field somewhere in the country side with some old second hand trailers). 10 years later you are in parlaiment, well known in the West, your Dutch is quite good, you have finished a university education. Well done huh? And no that is not easy, if it was easy there would be more like you.

Then after 10 years, people conclude that you have no right to have a Dutch citizenship. No matter what you did in those 10 years: university, parlaiment and so on. It doesn’t matter. Most reactions: rules are rules and go back to your country. No sense of loyalty, no idea that you might be a member of the Dutch ‘imagined community’. And if this can happen to a member of parlaiment, it can happen to every migrant citizen. So, I truly think some Muslim migrants should be more careful in expressing their relief that Hirsi Ali is leaving. What happened to her can happen to them, could be the conclusion. And most people don’t have an elite for support like Hirsi Ali has.

1 comment.

C L O S E R – Hirsi Ali & Loyalty

Posted on May 25th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

Looking at the press reports and internet forums, it seems that many Muslim migrants and second generation are very glad that Hirsi Ali is going to leave this country and are not very sad about what happened to her. (A few seem to regret it but to me it looks like a minority but I have to admit I haven’t talked to many in real life about this).

I am wondering if they should be really pleased about all of this.

Let’s imagine the following. You are an asylumseeker. You have changed your story in such a way that you know you have more chance that the Dutch will grant you a status as a refugee. (The ones who never changed a story so that it would fit bureaucratic institutions, stop reading.) At that time you are in an asylum shelter (A field somewhere in the country side with some old second hand trailers). 10 years later you are in parlaiment, well known in the West, your Dutch is quite good, you have finished a university education. Well done huh? And no that is not easy, if it was easy there would be more like you.

Then after 10 years, people conclude that you have no right to have a Dutch citizenship. No matter what you did in those 10 years: university, parlaiment and so on. It doesn’t matter. Most reactions: rules are rules and go back to your country. No sense of loyalty, no idea that you might be a member of the Dutch ‘imagined community’. And if this can happen to a member of parlaiment, it can happen to every migrant citizen. So, I truly think some Muslim migrants should be more careful in expressing their relief that Hirsi Ali is leaving. What happened to her can happen to them, could be the conclusion. And most people don’t have an elite for support like Hirsi Ali has.

1 comment.

Protected: Wilders wil bouw Westermoskee stoppen – telegraaf.nl [Binnenland]

Posted on May 17th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

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Protected: de Volkskrant – Milli Görüs

Posted on May 17th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

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Protected: Brabants Dagblad – Majj verwijst varken naar de prullenbak

Posted on May 14th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

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RNW: Is the current criticism of Islam comparable to anti-Semitism in the 1930s?

Posted on May 6th, 2006 by .
Categories: Internal Debates, Multiculti Issues.

RNW: Is the current criticism of Islam comparable to anti-Semitism in the 1930s?
Is the current criticism of Islam comparable to anti-Semitism in the 1930s?
Transmission date: Sunday 14 May 2006

Andy Clark

05-05-2006

Can the present anti-Islam rhetoric really be compared to European and especially German anti-Semitism in the 1930s?Muslim human rights activist Abdullahi An-Na’im thinks the current anti-Islam rhetoric in the Netherlands – repeated worldwide by its leading proponents – is indeed similar to the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the 1930s.

Professor an-Na’im made his comments in a speech at Utrecht University during a commemoration day ceremony for the Second World War.

He says anti-Semitism in those days had its unique characteristics, which can never be repeated.

But, he argues, that does not deny the existence of a basic similarity, the similarity being the definition of the one community as essentially different from – and superior to – others.

“The principle is to first reduce a people to a stereotype and then say that therefore they are bad people. In that way, defining superior Dutchness as opposed to Islam is in fact comparable to anti-Semitism,” he said.

Professor an-Na’im says he fled the tyranny of Sudanese Islamists, but now he sees the same type of thinking in the anti-immigration and anti-Islam rhetoric in Europe. Ironically, he says, the critics in Europe of Islam and the fundamentalists themselves both advocate the same claim – that human rights are incompatible with Islam.

What do you think? Is there a witch-hunt against Islam comparable to 1930s anti-Semitism?

The panellists:

Professor Abdullahi an-Na’im is an internationally known Muslim reformer and human rights activist. Originally a law professor at Khartoum University, he fled Sudan after his mentor and friend, the Sudanese Muslim reformer Mahmoud Taha, was executed as a heretic in 1985. At present, professor an-Na’im is a guest lecturer at Utrecht University.

“The Dutch people have to be on their guard not to turn the Netherlands into a Dutch fortress,” he said.

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Protected: Trouw, deVerdieping| overigeartikelen – Generatie Lonsdale / Vol hormonen en niet lekker in hun vel

Posted on May 6th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues, Youth culture (as a practice).

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Protected: Trouw, deVerdieping| overigeartikelen – Generatie Lonsdale / Vol hormonen en niet lekker in hun vel

Posted on May 6th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues, Youth culture (as a practice).

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Protected: Trouw, hetNieuws| nederland – ’Lonsdale-jongeren zijn vooral bang’

Posted on May 6th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues, Youth culture (as a practice).

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Protected: Trouw, hetNieuws| nederland – ’Lonsdale-jongeren zijn vooral bang’

Posted on May 6th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues, Youth culture (as a practice).

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Protected: AD.nl – Extreemrechts, net als hun ouders

Posted on May 4th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Multiculti Issues.

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